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New Bodies, New Identities? The Negotiation of Cloning Technologies in Young Adult Fiction

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Abstract

This essay examines the fantasy of life extension enabled through the transfer of one’s consciousness to new, cloned bodies in the event of disease, accident, or old age. This vision has recently been dramatized in both fiction and film, bearing witness to the power of this imaginary scenario. This eventuality would raise wide-ranging ethical issues, which speculative bioethics should begin to contemplate. Interestingly, it is young adult fiction that has recently provided an extensive and consistent cluster of novels dealing not only with this topic but also with the interrelated notion of clones purposely grown to replace a loved one, with a concomitant array of further ethical concerns. These and related topics will be examined here through the lens of fiction and recent theoretical work on future biotechnological scenarios.

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Notes

  1. The 6th Day portrays a dystopian version of this trope that stretches all plausibility, with the brain being transferred to the grown-up clone through the optic nerve, but then so do the other variants addressed here. For all that, they can still be described as “speculative fiction” in the sense that, as Atwood [1] explains, they draw on biomedical advances that might yield that result in some future time.

  2. The Canadian TV series Orphan Black also uses clones to deal with deep-rooted questions of biological origins and the prospect of life extension, as well as the ethics and limits of scientific experimentation. Ultimately, the main objective of the medical experiments is the prolongation of human life.

  3. Touchstone, the novel’s publisher, compares And Again with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go [5].

  4. Writing about what he calls the carbon-copy clone, Hamner [6] observes how these have often served, in genetic fantasy, as the “ultimate blank slate […] manipulated for any end desired by more powerful humans and their corporations” (89).

  5. Altered Carbon can be included in this increasingly emphatic thematic cluster that envisages novel ways of prolonging life, including new (cloned) bodies. Although particularly relevant to this topic, an analysis of Altered Carbon falls beyond the scope of this essay.

  6. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind (2007) [17] and Trish Moran’s Mirror Image (2017) [18] constitute prime examples of this trope. In adult fiction, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) [5] provides a dramatization of this topic, as does Michael Bay’s film The Island (2005).

  7. All these terms are capitalized in the works referred to.

  8. Resleeving consists in being “spun” into a new body, to which your cortical stack, with all your memories, is transferred.

  9. Michael Hauskeller has strong reservations about the possibility that an uploaded mind will ever be similar to the original one [25].

  10. See Ede [26].

  11. In their contribution to the debate whether personality can be transferred to a synthetic human, through a process of mind uploading, as a way of surviving physical death, Sim Bamford and John Danaher claim that since a person’s identity is to a great extent a social construct the networks of interaction between that person and their environment need to be sustained in order to maintain that identity active [26]. They assert that “social factors will be more important than neurological or metaphysical ones when it comes to the future utilization of personality transfer technologies” (7).

  12. Controversially, bioethicist and director of the Centre for Bioethics at Oxford University Julian Savulescu [29] defends the position that the “most justified use of human cloning is arguably to produce stem cells for the treatment of disease” (94). As a consequence, he further claims that it is “not only reasonable to produce embryos as a source of multipotent stem cells, but that it is morally required to produce embryos and early fetuses as a source of tissue for transplantation” (94).

  13. In young adult fiction, there are many examples of clones created specifically to be organ donors, a theme that cannot be explored here for lack of space.

  14. Representative examples of this widespread trope include The Matrix (1999), The 6th Day (2000), Alien Resurrection (1997), Multiplicity (1996), and The Island (2005), propagating harmful misunderstandings predicated on scientific inaccuracies about cloning technology.

  15. See Vermeulen et al. [39] for an overview of the ethical issues pertaining to bioprinting organs and tissues.

  16. See Schick [43] for a discussion of the importance of anticipatory bioethics. For a reflection on the potential pitfalls anticipatory bioethics, different types of speculation as well as methods used to predict scientific trends might be prone to, see Racine et al. [44].

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  1. Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Aline Ferreira

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Ferreira, A. New Bodies, New Identities? The Negotiation of Cloning Technologies in Young Adult Fiction. Nanoethics 13, 245–254 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-019-00353-4

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